


Secret

by apparitionism



Series: Gifts [1]
Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bering & Wells Holiday Gift Exchange 2018, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:54:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28097994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparitionism/pseuds/apparitionism
Summary: Here’s some Bering & Wells Christmas: this is the first of my two 2018 B&W Gift Exchange stories, both written for @mfangeleeta, who asked for Myka and Helena’s first Christmas together. This initial offering is a quiet, somewhat generic AU version of that. To the best of my recollection, we haven’t, in the years of the B&W Secret Santa exchange, had many, or any?, pieces that were actuallyabouta Secret Santa gift exchange—so here’s one. As you can see, it’s called “Secret.” I bet you can guess the name of the second story (which is an in-universe first-Christmas tale)... anyway, sssshhh. If you listen close, you might hear a couple of voices speaking low on a silent night.
Relationships: Myka Bering/Helena "H. G." Wells
Series: Gifts [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2058486
Comments: 21
Kudos: 45





	Secret

“You didn’t come to the party.” The soft words fit the vast, cubicled space, now that the sonic sea of voices and technology had receded for the night and left the floor in silence; now that the overhead lights were out, now that the walls of windows were dark, now that the only illumination, seemingly in the entire world, was the small incandescent defiance of the desk lamp of the person who heard the words, felt their softness, and was thus not startled by them.

“What are you doing here?” asked that person. Myka Bering had expected to see no one tonight, the company’s Christmas-party night, not when the Christmas-party night was the Friday before Christmas: no one, and certainly not this vision of a woman who on a normal workday seemed to have descended from some higher plane to serve as an aspirational sight for the masses. Tonight, dressed for a Christmas party thrown by a prosperous insurance company in the toniest of downtown-hotel ballrooms? Surely the assembled would have voted by acclamation to keep her there.

“I’m asking you that same question,” said the vision.

“I didn’t want to… see.” But Myka said this with a wince, which did not go unnoticed.

“See what?”

“Any of it,” Myka now said offhand, trying to recover. “It’s really not my—”

“ _See. What._ ” It was a muted, though not diluted, version of her “I refuse to waste my time in a pointless meeting” voice, and Myka knew she had no choice but to give a plausible answer.

***

When Myka had received the “Secret Santa” email from HR…

_This is an opportunity_ , had been her first, immediate thought.

She then revised that first thought with a significant insertion: _This is NOT an opportunity_. Because an opportunity would never take the form of an email that began, “Hi Myka! In this year’s Warehouse Mutual Insurance Holiday Gift Exchange, you’re the Secret Santa for…”

And there could be no opportunity whatsoever in that sentence ending with the name “Helena Wells.”

Not the opportunity she wanted it to be.

Because where had her mind gone, in that first immediacy? To roses, of rare and foreign colors and scents; to spices, to perfumes, to potions; to silks and stones; to gilding amalgams, to meteoric alloys, to all the richest and finest of ways there might be to say “look at all that I would offer you.”

Certainly twenty-five dollars was not enough to buy gold and frankincense, but certainly twenty-five dollars _was_ enough to buy something stupidly, pointlessly revealing.

That did not have to happen, of course; she could give a generic gift. But equally, she didn’t want to have to say “Yes, that boring thing, that’s from me.” Better to be no one than to be part of the vast run of cases. So she swapped with Giselle in Claims, who, Myka had heard—heard, and felt a pain in her heart upon hearing—was interested in Helena. It wasn’t only Giselle; many, many people seemed to be bold enough to show visible, vocal interest… but while Myka was not shy, not exactly, she was not prepared to show such visible, vocal interest. In this, too, better to be no one than to be part of the vast run of swooning, wanting cases.

In the swap, she got someone she’d never met, never even heard of, so she went to an office supply store, stood in front of its “Secret Santa ideas” display, and gathered vaguely disparate items, none of which she herself would have been offended to receive, to total twenty-five dollars. (Actual total: twenty-eight dollars and thirty-three cents. She tried to feel magnanimous rather than mournful.) She put them into a gift bag, affixed red and green ribbon to its handles, and left it with the gift-exchange committee chair in HR, to be given to the appropriate person at the party. “Everyone should give appropriately,” that first email had said, and she persuaded herself that this was the way to ensure that outcome.

****

You come to a new place for a new job; you try to find space for yourself in this new place, which affords a new start. “You need a new start, Myka,” a friend of long standing had told you, and you believed him and found one: a new place, a new start, a new job. New people. But there is one new person in particular at the new job. _Weeks_ you stare at her… weeks you _try not to_ stare at her. There is no such thing, you tell yourself, as love at first sight. If there were, you would have fallen into it before. And you haven’t before, so you haven’t now. You haven’t come to this new place to fall in love, at first or any other ordinal sight.

You keep trying not to stare.

You don’t even know her name, not for the longest time, but once you hear it and know that it is hers, you hear it constantly; everyone all at once seem to take up talking about her. Your ears, your eyes: this is not what you came here for, to look at Helena Wells, to listen for “Helena Wells.”

The company, however, doesn’t care what you think you came here for. You’re assigned to work on a project with her, and you panic, because what about the staring? Fortunately, the need to _do business_ breaks the looking-spell somewhat, but your enchantment only deepens. The emails and meetings, just the two of you, grow longer and longer. She works in loss control; you are in risk management. You are not managing your own risk, not at all; you see that the cliff you have already unknowingly, unintentionally, jumped from is well above you. When will you hit the ground and wake up?

After the project completes itself, whenever you pass each other in the hallway, whenever each of you says that simple “hi,” you—this you that is some part of a larger thing you don’t dare think of as “us”—can’t stop smiling.

You buy her dinner, the first time, because at the end of a workday you find her standing in the lobby, despondent at whatever her phone’s screen is telling her, and you want to banish the misery from her face but also pocket it, because it is precious, a vulnerability she does not often show.

Over that meal and then others, you laugh and you linger.

When you have reason to say her name to other people (because you are now one of those who has taken up talking about her), you become conscious that the speaking of a name is a bringing-to-presence. “Helena,” you say, the name mattering in your mouth, and your secret knowledge of the disjuncture between the presence that utterance conjures for you and the presence it delivers to others _thrills_ you.

Her material presence literally destabilizes you, over and over again, but you hold fast to one particular near-fall: it is the first time you let yourself know, without question, what you want. You are walking beside her, and you are attending intently to her voice as it speaks about reinsurance contracts. You stop, mentally, to remind yourself that you are meant to be concentrating on the contracts, not on her voice as it speaks about them, and the stop makes you stumble. You recover yourself fast, but not fast enough to prevent her planting herself in front of you and clasping your arms. Deep brown concern gazes up at you as a deep brown hum resolves into the words “Are you all right?” You nod, but you imagine bringing your lips to hers in answer to that question—revealing that ever since your first sight of her, the answer has been “no.”

****

Myka held these scenes they had played together, these episodes, very close—precious contents in a precious box. Having that cache, keeping it secret: that was special; in itself, it allowed Myka to distinguish herself from that vast run of cases. Keeping it safe, too: this risk Myka tried to manage with great care. Going to the party, seeing what she was likely to have seen, would have put it all in peril, so here she had sat instead.

But here Helena now stood, with her gowned body and her “see what” demand, and Myka saw that her carefully plotted risk avoidance had produced its exact opposite: certain disaster. She had nothing plausible to say, in response to that demand, save the truth, so she said a prayer, possibly of farewell, for the box and all it contained. “See you open a gift from someone else,” she admitted.

Helena said nothing at first, and Myka was tempted to try to retract her words, say they were a feeble joke, fall back on explaining that she was antisocial, needed to work, liked the peace and quiet. She got so far as opening her mouth and inhaling before Helena said, slowly, “Interesting that that would be your reason. Particularly since you should not have had to see that. Given, as it was told to me, that you were originally assigned to be my Secret Santa.”

“Who told you that?”

“Giselle,” Helena said. She lifted her chin, and it felt to Myka like a “what are you going to say to _that_ ” challenge.

All Myka could manage was “What? Why would she—”

“She was explaining to me how eagerly she had taken you up on your offer to let her be the one to buy me a gift instead. I believe she meant her industry and enthusiasm in pursuing my affections to be persuasive.”

“Her industry and enthusiasm,” Myka echoed. Surely that would win the day—but then why was Helena here? And why did she look so… dismayed? Or was that simple annoyance? Either way, why?

Her next utterance gave Myka no answers: “My question to you is, why would you do that to me?”

“Why would I—what?”

“And after what I’ve done for you.” This with a shake of the head, a shake of disappointment that Myka had seen directed at others and had hoped never to be subjected to.

“What you—what?”

“Do you imagine I wanted to watch _you_ open a gift from someone else?”—and Myka took a breath to say another “what,” but Helena left her no room for it—“I could have stayed home, but I chose to engage in a more difficult means of forestalling that sad sight: I exerted a great deal of pressure on the assigning committee in HR to reveal to me who’d got you. I then proposed a swap to that person, _but_ given my own… enthusiasm, the deal required some sweetening. I’ll have you know that as of January the first, I will be parking in a lesser space.”

All Myka could find to say was, “You love your parking space.” This was true. Corporate business culture subsisted on trivia, and everyone, even Helena, clung to these pointless markers. She’d told Myka the story of how she had, over two years, worked her way, via retirements and transfers and strategic barters, plus her own promotions, into being assigned precisely the spot she wanted.

“I _did_ love my parking space,” Helena said. “I suspect Giselle didn’t drive so hard a bargain with you. In fact I suspect she didn’t drive a bargain at all. Am I worth so little to you?”

“Your worth,” Myka said. “Not a bargain. I didn’t want to.”

“To what?”

“But I thought I had to.”

“I don’t need to ask ‘to what’ again. And I don’t need to ask why. I myself did think we were approaching a point. A decision point, if you will.”

Myka, perversely, tried to forestall it. If they could stay suspended in this Friday night… those scenes in the box, what were they worth now? “I never got what I wanted for Christmas,” she said. “I stopped believing in Santa when I was four.”

“Believe what you want to believe, but I have a gift for you,” Helena said. She reached into her purse and removed a small package. “From your Santa, who is of course no secret now.” She looked at the wrapped package in her hands. Looked again at Myka. “I’ve changed my mind.”

“You have?”

“This should also be no secret.” She leaned down, and _this is not happening_ , Myka thought, but then it was... a kiss of a softness that matched their voices, that warmed to the light, that nestled into the pillowed hollow of Myka’s heart where she safed her most fragile of yearnings. _If she falls in love with you_. That delicate wish: so nearly unimaginable.

Myka would have said, out loud, that this kiss, too, was unimaginable. But that was not true, for she had imagined it. Not correctly… not in its fullness… she felt Helena’s lips leave hers, and she opened her eyes.

Helena’s eyes were still closed; her mouth formed a smile. Then she opened her own eyes and said, “You look surprised.”

“I am.” She had wished it would feel right, this kiss, but she hadn’t _believed_ it would.

“So am I. This was so simple.” Another kiss, this one more firm. And even more right. “I’d originally thought to make my way to this point by impressing you with my cleverness. I would engineer some complicated giving of an elaborate series of presents, or concoct a plot with a last-minute revelation, or contrive a dash through the airport. But then I pared it down to what seemed to be the basics: you, me, a gift. In front of everyone we work with, which for some reason I was convinced was the only way I would not lose my nerve.”

The idea of Helena losing her nerve about _anything_ was absurd—but she did look completely serious, so instead Myka focused on a different absurdity: “A dash through the airport?”

Helena nodded, sheepish but with a sly glint. “Plus a missed flight.”

“Would that make you happy? We can go to the airport right now and dash through it. We’ll miss every flight.”

“We’ve known each other some months.” Helena was smiling now.

“We have.”

“And those months have led me to believe that you would do that: you would take me to the airport and enact some silly play. If I wanted you to.” Her voice grew softer and softer, as did her smile.

Myka would have done that, that or anything else Helena wanted her to do, starting from the first-sight moment in which she had begun to try not to stare. “I would,” she said, just in case Helena had any doubt.

“Open your gift.”

“I thought I had.”

“The one in paper.”

“I don’t have anything for you.”

Helena kissed her for a third time. “Liar.”

Myka took the package from her, pulled at the paper, got to a cardboard box, opened that, and found… another box. This one was wooden, decorated with a complicated inlay-like patterned veneer. “This is beautiful,” Myka said.

“Isn’t it?” Helena agreed. “It’s from Japan.”

Myka said, “You bought me a beautiful box from Japan.” _All the richest and finest of ways_ … she turned it in her hands. “Does it open?”

“It does. But it’s a puzzle. A beautiful puzzle, just like you.”

A puzzle. Myka looked at the box more closely, turned it with greater care, put a bit of pressure on its surfaces. A puzzle. She felt a slight give: the complicated nature of the veneer hid seams, along which segments of the sides might slide. A push here, a slide there… no, not there. She had to reverse everything she’d done and start again, and she glanced up at Helena, saw that she was looking with avidity at the box in Myka’s hands—or even, thrillingly, at Myka’s hands themselves?—her eyes brighter than usual, like stars in a hurry.

Myka set back to her task with determination: show her what these hands could do. A slide here, a push there… again, not there, but this side _, here_. Myka was so absorbed that now Helena’s voice, still so quiet, did startle her: “You were meant to solve the puzzle,” Helena said. “In front of everyone. Find its secret. I knew you would,” she finished, as Myka slid the tiny box’s cover open.

“Its secret?” Inside, in a nest of dark velvet, lay a small silvery piece of metal… _meteoric alloys_ … muted in its shine, like a worn quarter. Most saliently, however, it was heart-shaped. Myka set it flat in her right hand and held it under the glow of her lamp. It warmed, there between her palm and the light.

“My heart,” Helena said.

Myka looked up at her, now with a bit of sly of her own. “Doesn’t that mean _you’re_ the beautiful puzzle?”

“Metaphors work in mysterious ways.”

Myka very nearly asked, “How did you know it should be a box,” but Helena was right: mysterious. So instead, she said, “I can’t believe this cost only twenty-five dollars.”

Helena said, with an affected formality, “I am in possession of a receipt from the antique store where it was purchased to prove that that is what I paid for it.” Then the starch collapsed into mischief: “If I overpaid tremendously for another item listed on that receipt, that’s my own foolishness, isn’t it?”

“But why did you do that?” Myka asked. “Why did you think you needed to?”

This got her an otherwise familiar response: a small head-toss of exasperation. “I gave up on scenarios of complication, but why would I give up on impressing you? I suppose I wanted you to be so overwhelmed by this gift in its entirety—beauty, metaphor, worth—that you would fall into my arms. Unrealistic, as a scenario, but I couldn’t see how else to cause you to fall into my arms.”

“You could’ve just said ‘fall into my arms.’ You could’ve just said that.” _Swooning, wanting_.

“I thought I was saying that all along. Not aloud, but I thought I was.”

“I couldn’t hear it.”

“What do you hear now?”

What did she hear now? Myka listened, waited. “Two people breathing at each other,” she finally said. And because there was no reason not to, she added, “And the HVAC system.” Helena laughed, a little trail-off peal, and Myka said, to that, “Now I hear a beautiful sound.”

“If you were anyone else,” Helena said, “I would try to persuade you to come back to the party. With me. _With_ me.”

A dash through an airport; a party. Myka said, “If _you_ were anyone else, I wouldn’t be persuaded.”

****

You, who had wanted to be special or nothing, find yourself doubly special: first, you are the only one in the tony downtown ballroom not dressed for a party, but second—and vastly more important—your arm is around her gowned body the entire time, and “I persuaded her to come,” she keeps saying, with evident pride. “I went and found her and persuaded her.” Many, many people, upon seeing your arm around her, claim to have seen this coming. To them, she says, “She resisted me. Can you imagine?” and no one can imagine that, least of all you.

The looking-spell has settled on you again; you stare at her profile, her cheekbone, her neck.

Your hand touches the heart-coin, warm in your pocket.

She turns and meets your eyes.

_Infinitely_ special.

END

**Author's Note:**

> original tumblr tags (slightly edited): i fear this is underbaked in several ways, one of which is similar to the way my earlier frankincense au was, before i revised it for ao3, myka wasn't much of a character in it, just someone for helena to fall for, and in this one there isn't much of a helena, just someone for myka to swoon over, also the pieces here need to work together more intricately, in the manner of the noted box, those are gorgeous btw, highly recommended as objects, and marquetry as a process is surpassingly cool, anyway next story coming soon, (as mentioned in the summary, i bet you can guess what it's called), i heart you mfangeleeta, and everybody else in this b&w holiday club


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